Enhancing Your System’s Performance

Any of you who have been using the same PC or Mac for quite a few months will now be aware that your system’s performance is getting a little slower day after day. The speedy startup time you once enjoyed would have increased by now and applications might take longer than usual to load. This decrease in your system’s efficiency is mainly due to the large amounts of files that get stored in its hard drive. Some of you might have the habit of containing a system that is not cluttered too much with several files and folders as you keep organizing your desktop every now and then, while others always maintain their system disorganized due to their individual preferences. This is because organization usually takes a lot of time, which might be annoying to some people, as they might feel that moving a particular file to its respective folder is an unnecessary task.

In order to have your system working as efficiently as it did when you bought it, you must follow a few steps to properly maintain it. There are different strategies that can be used to enhance the performance of your system, some of which are discussed in the following sections of this article.

Augment Your System’s Memory

The very first strategy that you can follow in order to improve the performance of your system or laptop is to add or augment more memory to your system. As the various improvements in technology have given rise to the usage of applications and interfaces that are generally graphic intensive, you now require much more memory space in your system than what you would have required a few years back. If you have a system or laptop that has been installed with a RAM of size less than 2 GB, significantly slows down its performance when you are using more than one program, and is a couple of years old, then you should probably start considering about adding additional memory to it.

In order to achieve this, the first thing you should do is check whether your system has enough space to accommodate the amount of additional memory you are thinking about including in it. You can do this by two ways: one is by inspecting the computer on your own and the other is by making use of a scanning utility that can be found on the websites of different manufacturers. After completing this process, you will be able to determine the amount of space your computer will be able to hold further, and also the speed and type of RAM your system would support. In case you find that you system does not support additional memory, you will have to remove some of its older memory slots and add newer ones with higher capacity, which will enable you to add more memory space to your computer.

Carry Out Constant System Maintenance

As you keep using your system’s hard drive to install and uninstall programs, and to store and retrieve data, your computer will automatically become less efficient. The main reason for this is, as you keep storing, retrieving, and restoring large documents or files on your system, the documents usually get fragmented, which means that they do not get stored in adjacent or contiguous storage spaces. And as different parts of the same documents happen to get stored in different storage spaces, it takes longer than usual for the system to store or retrieve them when needed. One other reason for your system’s inefficiency is that when you uninstall a particular program, sometimes parts of the program are ignored, or the references of those programs might be left behind in the files of the operating system. Another reason would be an overflowing hard drive.

If you wish to avoid all the above mentioned issues, you should take steps to maintain your system on a regular basis. Following are a few system maintenance tips that might serve useful to you:

Firstly, in order to make your hard drive less cluttered by freeing up its space, you should start uninstalling any program that you no longer use or need on your system. When you do this, make sure that you perform the removal process properly, by either selecting the option Uninstall a program in the Control Panel of your Windows PC or by choosing the option Uninstall of any particular program of your choice that is present in the Start menu. If you have a Windows PC or laptop, you can also cleanup your Windows registry by using a registry cleaner that can be obtained online.

If you happen to contain files of large sizes, such as videos or photos, stored on your system that you would not need on a regular basis but would wish to keep, then you might want to consider transferring them to a removable storage device like an external hard drive or DVD. Once you copy all those photos and videos to a removable medium, you can delete those from your system’s hard drive and free up its memory space. Before you delete files on the hard drive, in order to make sure that the transfer of files was successful, try opening the files from the storage device, and if the files are of extreme importance, then you should store them on more than one removable storage devices.

Constantly scan for spyware and viruses on your computer or laptop. If your system slows down all of a sudden, then it might be due to the existence of a spyware program, computer virus, or any other type of threat. In order to identify and rectify such problems, you can make use of a reliable antispyware and antivirus software available online.

By following these steps regularly, you can be sure that your system would not become inefficient any time soon.